The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (16 page)

Nestor made his way down that hill to a seawall and leaned up against a small statue of the Cuban poet José Martí, watching the sea of dusk. There he daydreamed about how happy he could have been with her, if only he had not been so cruel, or if he had been a better conversationalist or had some real ambition. If only she had not seen the weakness in his soul. As if in a dream, María appeared behind him, and she was smiling. When he went to touch her hand, it was as if he were touching air. Nothing was there. But María was there. She spoke so gently to him and so tenderly about the torments of her heart and soul that when she left his side, he felt oddly calmed.

What was it that she had said to him?

“No matter what, I will love you forever.”

Forever and forever unto death.

He spent that night camped outside her doorway, sighing. In the morning he found that she had left a plate of ham and bread outside by the pavement where he had slept, but it had been overrun by an army of ember-red ants.

He returned to Havana and told Cesar what María had told him.

Around his neck was the crucifix which his mother had given him for his First Communion and which had often touched the fullness of Beautiful María’s breasts. And around his chest, a sensation of stones and earth constricting him, the vague, pulsing feeling in the joints of his bones, which turned to wax, as if any second he would collapse.

“She said she still loves me. She said she thinks about me all the time. She said that she never wanted to hurt me. She says that sometimes when she’s lying in bed at night she thinks about me and can still feel me inside her. She said . . .”

“Nestor, stop it.”

“She said she would have married me except for one thing, this other fellow in her life, an old
prometido
from her town, where she’s from. That he was just someone she was trying to forget. A country bumpkin who used to ignore her when they were together and who came here to take her back, and”—he cupped his hands over his face—“she felt that she had to go back to him and . . .”

“Nestor, stop it.”

“She said she’ll always remember our times together as being beautiful, but he came along before me, and, well, now our fate is sealed. She said that she married him because of an inner pain. She says she never meant to deceive me, that she really loved me. She says that her heart was broken that we hadn’t met a long time before, but this man had always been her love . . .”

“Nestor, she was like a
puta!”

“She said that I was her true love but . . .”

“Nestor, stop it. Where are your balls, man? You’re better off without her.”

“Yes, better off.”

And what happened? After the shattering of this love affair, Nestor just wasn’t the same and took on the fearful expression of his youth when he would cower in the darkness of his room at night, a feeling of doom whirling around him. He would go to his job at the Explorers’ Club on Neptuno like a somnambulist, moving about the wood-paneled rooms with their maps and globes and lions’ and antelopes’ and rams’ heads, carrying his trays of daiquiris and whiskeys for the prosperous British and Americans without ever smiling or saying a friendly word. On one of those days a shot rang out from the fancy toilets there, and the workers in the club rushed to find one of the gentlemen, a certain Mr. Jones, dead, the smoking revolver still in his hand. It would turn out that his real name was Hugo Wuerschner and he’d decided to take his life because of another club member, who had found out that Wuerschner had once acted as an agent in Havana for the Third Reich. Refusing to be blackmailed, Wuerschner, long despondent about the fall of his Führer, preferred to bring his grief to an end. The dead man’s contorted and disillusioned expression was like Nestor’s, so extreme was his suffering.

His older brother took Nestor everywhere, to the movies, the all-night cafés, and the whorehouses, and he told him, “She’s not worth it,” over and over again. “You’re better off being a little hard with these women, because when you’re good, it turns out bad.” And: “Just forget her, she’s worthless . . . not worth a single tear, you understand?”

Whenever he felt pain in his life, the older Mambo King would find himself a woman, and so he thought smothering Nestor with women was the answer. Memory of a drunken evening in the Havana of 1948 which the two brothers spent down by the harbor in a brothel called the Palace, their backs arching and exuberant sexes rising and falling endlessly through the night. Curling tongues, slapping bellies, moist thighs. They fucked and fucked and then roaring drunk made their way down to the harbor, where Nestor threw bottles at some sailors and wanted to confess his sins to a priest. Reaching the harbor, Nestor decided to steal a yacht so they might sail around the world, but when he found a rowboat and took it out thirty yards he lost the oars and vomited in the water. Standing up and laughing, he pissed into the bay, which the moonlight was chopping up into triangle reflections of the red and yellow and blue party lights of the city. In the distance, he heard the booming horn of a ship, crying out,
Castillo, Castillo,
and he shouted, “To hell with everything!” Laughing, he kept thinking, The hell with María, I am alive!

Then they went home to their
solar,
Cesar pulling Nestor through the streets and stumbling toward buildings that seemed to bow and nod like wise old Chinese men. They found the gate and the stairway up into their
solar,
up ten steps and back down fifteen, Cesar calming his brother, Nestor laughing loudly.

“To hell with everything!”

But even that night did not penetrate the glorious mask of his suffering. What powers María held over him, no one knew. That would remain a mystery to Cesar.

“You’ve always been that way, crying over nothing,” Cesar said to him. “She’s worthless, bad for you like a bottle of poison. Couldn’t you see that from the beginning?”

“But I love her.”

“
Hombre,
she’s garbage.”

“Without her, I want to die.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“If you knew my pain . . .”

“Dios mío,
you’ve got to stop humiliating yourself this way.”

(Then the voices went on until the last fading trumpet line of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” inhalation of a cigarette, sip of whiskey, and the record-player arm lifts up again.)

A
LTHOUGH NESTOR USED THICK
World War II-issue prophylactics, he was sometimes very careless and casual about his lovemaking with Delores, doing it without a rubber and withdrawing long after the initial shudder of ejaculation. She would lock herself up in the bathroom and clean out her womb with a douche that resembled a poultry baster, which she’d filled with bicarbonate of soda and seltzer. One afternoon, while waxing the rich man’s parquet floors, she had the sensation that her womb was filling up with light, like stars at dusk rising slowly in the dark sky, and it occurred to her that these intimations of light were those of a soul, a breath, life itself. A hundred-year-old Cuban doctor practicing on Columbus Avenue and 83rd Street diagnosed a pregnancy. She climbed the stairs to the La Salle Street apartment expecting that Nestor would greet the news with ecstatic, lovestruck joy. As she walked in, he was working on the very song he had been whistling when they’d met nearly a year ago. When she heard that melody, it would take her back to that day, and she believed that this bolero was now hers. She approached him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered, “I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant.”

Nestor took a deep breath, stared out into the middle of the living room, where sat a dolly and the black case of a bass American kit drum, blinked, sighed, and then said to her, “Are you sure?”

But when he saw the happiness in her expression wither away, he added, “No, I’m happy,
querida.
Really happy.”

Then he put his arms around her, but he lowered his head and seemed to be watching the window, which was open a slit to the fire escape, and in that moment she had the impression that he wanted to walk over to the window, climb out, and never come back.

The young musician did the right thing: Nestor and Delores were married by a Justice of the Peace in a small wooded town in New Jersey. After the ceremony, Nestor remained by the table on which Cesar Castillo had placed a case of chilled champagne, tossing back one glass after the other. They had no honeymoon but threw a party that started in a Chinatown restaurant and ended up in the Mambo Nine Club, where they knew the bartender and manager and a band of their musician friends from the dance halls provided the music. In the merriment of that day, she kissed and hugged her sister Ana María and wished to God that her father were alive to see her so happy again. She thought about him and felt sad. Following the example of all the merry friends, she drank too much of that champagne. Her inexperience caught up to her and she twirled in circles to a mambo and watched everyone’s face elongating, ears growing long and pointed like those of wolves, in the red and yellow lights of the club. Then things blurred and grew thick black borders. Later she woke up on the living-room couch of the La Salle Street apartment beside Nestor. He was still dressed, and with his head tilted back on the couch he was snoring and muttering to himself. She wiped his forehead with a kerchief, gave him a kiss, and thought, “My husband, my husband.”

But then she listened, and like pins through her side, she heard, faintly but clearly, “María, María.”

They had two children: Eugenio, who was born in ’51, and Leticia, in ’54. Nestor didn’t quite know what to make of fatherhood, he felt so underprepared for manly duty in this world. He realized it when Eugenio was born. At first he celebrated happily. He daydreamed about walking off into the future with his wife and son down golden paths, joyful in their love. But something got to him: the utter helplessness of the baby, its crying for attention, its need for care. Holding Eugenio in his arms and examining the fresh veins under the scalp of his soft pink and sweet-smelling head, he was frightened by all the things that might go wrong. He would think about this fellow who worked with him down at the plant, who had left his one-year-old daughter in a room by herself for fifteen minutes and returned to find her dead; and he would think about this drummer he knew, a really nice Cuban guy named Papito, whose nineteen-year-old son went
pffft
out of the world because one of the veins in his head had been too thin-walled and could not sustain a surge of blood during the playing of a softball game in Van Cortlandt Park. Nestor would cover Eugenio’s face with kisses, play with his toes, tickle his ribs, and sing to him. He loved it when the baby smiled and showed signs of recognizing his father, but when the baby showed any signs of discomfort, a terrible remorsefulness would overwhelm Nestor and he would walk the halls of the house as if some kind of tragedy were unfolding before his eyes. My son is suffering! And that simple fact seemed unbearable to him.

“Delores, do something with the
nene!
Make sure the
nene
is okay! Don’t forget the
nene!”

He would come home from the day job at the meat-packing plant and see how well Delores had taken care of them. Like a supervisor, he would peer down into their beds and nod pensively, examining them for the plumpness of their legs and color in their cheeks. He would feel at a loss, holding them in his arms. He was affectionate with them but never quite knew what to make of fatherhood. He was constantly brooding about them to himself, worried about their physical health. He saw them as being so helpless and so susceptible to harm that on some days he relived a terrible dream of his anxious childhood. In the middle of the day, he would think how Eugenio liked to play by the window. What if he climbed out and slammed to the pavement below?
Dios mío!
He would start pacing up and down and take five to call the apartment to make sure everything was all right. He would lift the side of white fatted beef off the conveyor belt and hoist it onto the back of a freezer truck, wearing a long smock that was smeared with blood and a pair of rubber boots. The smell of blood in the air, the carcasses and bones that were everywhere, didn’t help matters.

It didn’t help that Leticia developed asthma and was sickly for a long time. He felt so bad about her troubled breathing that he would come home every day with presents and candies for her. And because he was not unkind, there was always something in his pockets for Eugenio. He was astounded when they did not die, but the whole business with Leticia made him very tense. In some ways he could not stand to be around the house and the potential for disaster; in others, he could not bear to be away. Best was when the house was packed with visitors—jam sessions with other musicians and dinner parties with these musicians and their wives. And his older brother, Cesar, drunk, collar loosened, big bulge in his trousers, with his arms wrapped around a pretty girl’s waist.

When responsible, mature, good-hearted people who would know what to do in a crisis were around, Nestor breathed easy. But, generally speaking, he never relaxed for a moment. His moments of release? When his penis exploded with sperm and obliterated his personality, throwing him into a blue- and red-lit heaven of floating space, and when he played the trumpet and got lost in melody. Otherwise, he didn’t know what to do with himself. The responsibility weighed on his shoulders too heavily for his own good. His anxiety took on physical symptoms. Some nights, as he tried to sleep and terror lurked in the air, he would begin to sweat, and his heart would beat so rapidly he could swear he was about to have a heart attack. Other times, as it happened with his father, he broke out into terrible rashes. He was only twenty-eight in 1954, and though he didn’t have very good dietary habits, eating what Cubans liked to eat, he was thin and fit. Yet the pounding of his heart would plague him night after night, and he was convinced that there was something wrong with him. But he would never think of going to a doctor.